The art of the steal

This article was taken from the May issue of Wired
magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before
they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional
content bysubscribing online

The plane slowed and levelled out about a mile above ground. Up
ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairytale palace. When the
pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his
parachute straps and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a
second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the
tiled roof. It was early June 1998 and the evening wind was warm.
If it kept co-operating, Blanchard would touch down directly above
the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his
parachute toward his target.

A couple of days earlier, Blanchard had appeared to be just
another twenty something on holiday with his wife and her wealthy
father. The three of them were taking a six-month grand European
tour: London, Rome, Barcelona, the French Riviera, Vienna. When
they stopped at the Schloss Schönbrunn, the Austrian equivalent of
Versailles, his father-in-law's VIP status granted them a special
preview peek at a highly prized piece from a private collection.
And there it was: in a cavernous room, in an alarmed case, behind
bulletproof glass, on a weight sensitive pedestal -- a delicate but
dazzling ten-pointed star of diamonds fanned around one monstrous
pearl: the Koechert Diamond Pearl, better known as the Sisi Star.
Five seconds after laying eyes on it, Blanchard knew he would try
to take it.

The guide described the piece but Blanchard wasn't listening. He
was noting the motion sensors in the corner, the type of screws on
the case, the large windows nearby. To hear Blanchard tell it, he
has a savant-like ability to assess security flaws, like a criminal
Rain Man who involuntarily sees risk probabilities at every turn.
And the numbers came up good for the star. Blanchard knew he
couldn't fence the piece, which the guide said was worth $2
million. Still, he found the thing mesmerising and the challenge
was irresistible.

He began to work immediately, videotaping every detail of the
star's chamber. He surreptitiously used a key to loosen the screws
when the staff moved on to the next room, unlocked the windows, and
determined that the motion sensors would allow him to move --
albeit very slowly -- inside the castle. He stopped at the souvenir
shop and bought a replica of the Sisi Star to get a feel for its
size. He also noted the armed guards patrolling the halls.

But the roof was unguarded, and it so happened that one of the
skills Blanchard had picked up in his already long criminal career
was skydiving. He had also recently befriended a German pilot who
would help him procure a parachute. Just one night after his visit
to the star, Blanchard was making his descent to the roof.

Aerial approaches are a tricky business and Blanchard almost
overshot the castle, slowing himself just enough by skidding along
a pitched gable. Sliding down the tiles, arms and legs flailing for
a grip, Blanchard managed to save himself from falling four storeys
by grabbing a railing at the roof's edge. For a moment, he lay
motionless. Then he took a deep breath, unhooked the chute,
retrieved a rope from his pack, wrapped it around a marble column
and lowered himself down the side of the building.

Carefully, Blanchard entered through the window he had unlocked
the previous day. He knew there was a chance of encountering
guards. But the Schloss Schönbrunn was a big place, with more than
1,000 rooms. He liked the odds. If he heard guards, he figured, he
would disappear behind the massive curtains.

The nearby rooms were silent as Blanchard slowly approached the
display and removed the already loosened screws, carefully using a
butter knife to hold in place the two long rods that would trigger
the alarm system. The real trick was ensuring that the
spring-loaded mechanism the star was sitting on didn't register
that the weight above it had changed. Of course, he had that
covered, too: he reached into his pocket and deftly replaced
Elisabeth's bejewelled hairpin with the gift-store fake.

Within minutes, the Sisi Star was in Blanchard's pocket and he
was rappelling down a back wall to the garden, taking the rope with
him as he slipped from the grounds. When the star was dramatically
unveiled to the public the next day, Blanchard returned to watch
visitors gasp at the sheer beauty of a cheap replica. And when his
parachute was later found in a rubbish bin, no one connected it to
the star, because no one yet knew it was missing. It was two weeks
before anyone realised that the jewellery had disappeared.

Later, the Sisi Star rode inside the respirator of some scuba
gear back to his home base in Canada, where Blanchard would
assemble what prosecutors later called, for lack of a better term,
the Blanchard Criminal Organisation. Drawing on his encyclopedic
knowledge of surveillance and electronics, Blanchard became a
criminal mastermind. The star was the heist that transformed him
from a successful and experienced thief into a criminal
virtuoso.

Blanchard pulled off his first heist when he was a six-year-old
living with his single mother in Winnipeg. The family couldn't
afford milk and one day the boy spotted some bottles on a
neighbour's porch. "I snuck over there between cars like I was on
some kind of mission," he says. "And no one saw me take it." His
heart was pounding and the milk was somehow sweeter than usual.
"After that," he says, "I was hooked."

Blanchard moved to Nebraska, started going by his middle name,
Daniel, and became an accomplished thief. He didn't look the part
-- slim, short and bespectacled, he resembled a young Bill Gates --
but he certainly played it, getting into enough trouble to land in
reform school. "The way I met Daniel was that he stole my classroom
VCR," recalls Randy Flanagan, one of Blanchard's teachers. Flanagan
thought he might be able to straighten out the soft spoken and
polite kid, so he took Blanchard under his wing in his
home-mechanics class. Blanchard "was an absolute genius with his
hands," the teacher recalls. In Flanagan's class, Blanchard learned
construction, woodworking, model building and automotive mechanics.
The two bonded and Flanagan became a father figure to Blanchard,
driving him to and from school and looking out for him. "He could
see that I had talent," Blanchard says. "And he wanted me to put it
to good use."

By early in his high school years, however, Blanchard had
already abandoned his after-school job stocking groceries to pursue
more lucrative opportunities, such as fencing tens of thousands of
dollars in goods stolen by department-store employees he had
managed to befriend. "I could just tell who would work with me," he
says. "It's a gift, I guess."

Blanchard began mastering the workings of myriad mechanical
devices and electronics. He became obsessed with cameras and
surveillance: documenting targets, his own exploits and his huge
piles of money. Befitting a young tech enthusiast, he emptied an
entire Radio- Shack one Easter Sunday. At age 16, he bought a house
with more than $100,000 in cash. (He hired a lawyer to handle the
money and sign the deal on his behalf.) When he moved in, Blanchard
told his mother that the home belonged to a friend. "She looked the
other way," Blanchard says. "And I tried to keep it all from
her."